Added contributions to Bee tidbits:
Sun, 5 Nov 1995, G.R. Jones on Medieval
History added:
... It reminds me that I lazily forgot to follow up Paul Hyams' remarks
about seignurial apiaries by mentioning their appearance in the Domesday
Survey. They were clearly a valued asset and are recorded on select
manors. In three Worcestershire entries it is stated that the Bishop
had, from important estates with extensive wood-pasture, "honey and
hunting and timber" rights. By coincidence, just this week a fellow
student was asking my opinion about the possible superior status of a
Shropshire Domesday holding and my eye went straight to the line where a
beekeeper was recorded among the tenants.
And BTW, Diane, is my memory correct in suggesting to me that in the
case of the Irish patron saint of bees, St Gobnet, her name is itself
Irish for "bee"? Someone on the list should be able to say if my memory
is playing tricks. ...
Off list, Jean Lindsay, jlindsay@indiana.edu, Sun, 5 Nov 1995,
kindly provided:
One more tidbit for you. John Romer, in his documentary series _Ancient
Lives_, mentions beekeeping in New Kingdom Egypt. The series is about
Deir el-Medina, the village of craftsmen who made the tombs of the
pharoahs in the Valley of the Kings. He states that honey-gathering was
the only agricultural product the villagers made themselves. They kept
the hives in long, cylindrical tubes, and the bees would get their
necessary supplies from the cultivated fields below. I can't remember if
Romer's accompanying book says anything about it, but it might--if you're
interested. ISBN #0805012443. --Jean L.
Nov 7, 1995, M. Reid added that the toxic
honey in New Zealand has been documented eg Crane 'Honey' p204.
Jan.11.2000 - Jean Lindsay sent this long ago but it got lost in a pile of
e-mail. Apologies and many thanks. D. Cooper
Tue, 6 Apr 1999 16:29:38 -0500
From: "Jean P. Lindsay"
Subject: Re: More on bees...
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan McFeeley [SMTP:mcfeeley@keynet.net]
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 1999 9:12 AM
To: ane@oi.uchicago.edu
Subject: Re: ane Mad Honey (long!)
At 12:41 AM 4/2/99 -0500, Judith Weingarten wrote:
>Message text written by Dan McFeeley
>>Leach, David. "That's Why the Lady is a Tramp," Journal of the American
> Rhododendron Society, October 1982, pp. 151-152.
>
>Mayor, Adrienne. "Mad Honey!" Archaeology, vol 48, #6, November/December
> 1995, pp. 32-40.<
>
>For those of us without easy access to the Jr of Am Rhododendron Soc, or
>even Arch., could you tell us what are the (claimed) effects of eating raw
>honey?
>
>It sounds fascinating.
>
>Judith
Sure!
The problem is not so much eating raw, or organic honey, but the nectar
source of the honey. Certain plants are toxic and if the toxin is also in
the nectar of the flower, honey produced by it is also toxic. Kenneth
Lampe,
writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, warns that the
most likely sources for honey poisonings are small operation apiaries or
farms. Experienced beekeepers are generally aware of any toxic floral
sources in their area and take the necessary steps to prevent their honey
from becoming a source for toxic poisoning, such as monitoring the produce
and blending the honey from varying nectar sources in sufficient quantities
to eliminate any danger from toxicity from the local flora.
Raw, or unprocessed honey can present other dangers to consumers. Honey
has a water content of about 17 or 18%, which is too high an osmotic
pressure for micro organisms to grow and reproduce. It does contain
the spores of wild yeasts and bacteria, including botulism spores, as well
as various pollen grains from the nectar source. People with allergies can
have a reaction to certain types of honey, and honey can be dangerous to
children under one year of age due to the immaturity of the immune system
and G.I. tract. Commercial processing can reduce these risks, but honey
of any kind should never be given to children under one year of age.
The recorded history of the flowering rhododendron as a source of honey
poisonings goes back several millennia. The ill fortunes of Xenophon,
author
of the _Anabasis_, brilliant military leader and a former member of the
circle of students who followed Socrates, may be one of the more well known
instances of honey poisonings. In 401 B.C., after a disastrous campaign
in Persia, Xenophon was elected to take command of 10,000 Greek soldiers.
He lead them through mountains of Kurdistan, through Georgia and then
Armenia. They made camp in the territory of Colchis, two days march
from Trebizond, where they noticed a large number of beehives. After
feasting on the honey they raided from the hives, the soldiers became
"like intoxicated madmen," were seized with fits of vomiting, became weak,
disoriented, and collapsed by the thousands. "A great despondency
prevailed,"
he wrote, until they recovered a few days later and moved westward to
friendlier territory.
Pompey's armies, in 67 B.C., did not fare as well. While campaigning
against
Mithridates, the king of Pontus, he camped near Trebizond, close to where
Xenophon's soldiers had camped three hundred years ago. Allies of
Mithridates, the Heptakometes, placed toxic honeycombs along Pompey's
route.
The same scenario was repeated, and Pompey's soldiers were massacred. The
incident is recorded in Strabo's _Geography_. A similar ruse was used
against Russian foes of Olga of Kieve in 946 A.D. Five thousand were
massacred after accepting several tons of fermented honey from her
followers.
Tartar soldiers were cut down by Russians in 1489 after stopping at an
abandoned camp and drinking from the casks of mead they found there.
The nectar source for what came to be known as "mad honey" was a species
of rhododendron well known in the Black Sea region. The Roman naturalist,
Pliny wrote of the toxic honey of the region, calling it 'meli maenomenon,'
or "mad honey" and noting that, although the people of the area were able
to pay a large tribute of beeswax to the Romans every year, they were
unable to sell their honey due to its poisonous quality. Pliny was also
one of the first writers to attribute the toxic source of the honey to the
native rhododendron, azalea and oleander plants. Dioscorides, a Greek
physician whose _De Materia Medica_ became a major herbal reference for
physicians over the next 1,500 years, also noted the toxic nature of honey
produced in the Black Sea region and the flowers which produced the toxin.
Many modern writers considered themselves more enlightened and lightly
discounted the idea of mad honey. According to the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_
of 1929: "In all likelihood the symptoms described by these old writers
were
due to overeating," or to eating honey "on an empty stomach." On the
other hand, in the _Transactions of the American Philosophical Society_
(vol. 5 1802), Benjamin Barton gave a detailed report of known cases of
toxic honey poisoning in the U.S. The symptoms he described, dizziness,
disorientation, pain in the GI tract, convulsions, profuse perspiration,
vomiting, closely matched the descriptions of the Classical writers.
Former confederate surgeon J. Grammer wrote in _Gleanings in Bee Culture_
(1875) of cases of southern soldiers poisoned by honey. Again, he
described
symptoms of tingling, blurred vision, nausea, and loss of muscle control
which
subsided in a few days, just as had been recorded in ancient times.
P.C. Plugge, in 1891, was able to isolate the toxic compound in the honey
from Trebizond and identified it as andromedetoxin, now known as
acetylandromedol, a type of grayanotoxin. Pliny was verified; these toxins
are known to occur in Mediterranean oleander, members of the heath family
(Ericaceae) which includes the rhododendron, azaleas of the Black Sea
and Caucasus area, and the mountain laurel of the Eastern United States
and Pacific Northwest.
Grayanotoxins act as breathing inhibitors and hypnotics that act upon the
central nervous system. Their effect is to bind to sodium channels in
cell membranes, an important mechanism governing muscle and nerve cell
activation and deactivation. As a result, heart action, muscular control,
and the nervous system are greatly affected, according to the amount of
toxin taken into the body. Death is rare, but has occurred. Symptoms
begin with tingling, numbness, dizziness, impaired speech, and even
hallucinations such as whirling lights. With greater amounts of ingested
toxin, victims experience vertigo, delirium, nausea and vomiting, impaired
breathing, bradycardia (dangerously low heartbeat), hypotension (a drop
in blood pressure), cyanosis (blue color to the skin due to impairment
of the respiratory and circulatory systems), muscle paralysis and
unconscious.
In severe cases, ventricular tachycardia (abnormally high contraction of
the lower ventricular chambers of the heart) compounded by contractions
of the heart out of sync with the sinus node, the primary pace maker of
the heart, can occur.
Toxicity levels vary according to the species of rhododendron. Some are
highly toxic, such as the species that blooms so profusely in the Black
Sea region, and some are mildly toxic or even inactive. Poisonings from
ingestion of the plant or its nectar are extremely rare, and are more
commonly encountered in instances of toxic honey ingestion. Given the
care of beekeepers to prevent their honey from being contaminated by
toxic local flora, these cases are generally accidental. They are
common enough, however, on the northern Pacific coast for emergency
room departments to consider honey poisoning as a differential diagnosis
to be ruled out in cases presenting as acute myocardial infarction.
Treatment in these cases generally focuses on the cardiac symptoms of
altered heart rate and hypotension, with careful monitoring in the event
that the cardiac symptoms are severe enough to require a temporary
pacemaker.
Poison control data bases used by hospital emergency rooms in all parts of
the country will have some mention of toxic honey. Victims generally
recover within a few hours, with the symptoms subsiding at most in a few
days. Again, death from honey poisoning occurs very rarely in the total
number of recorded cases, and is dependent on the amount of honey ingested.
Honey poisonings in the writings of Greek and Roman authors are usually
associated in the springtime. Longus, a romantic poet of the 2nd century
A.D., for example, sung of the kiss of his lover, comparing it with "the
madness of new honey." Descriptions of mad honey, however, varied.
Benjamin Barton thought it was usually reddish in color, some ancient
descriptions pointed to an acid or bitter taste. Others said it was
indistinguishable from good honey, or worse, that a single honey comb
might contain both toxic honey and good honey. John Ambrose, state
apiculturist in North Carolina, has pointed out that bees will usually
bypass Ericacae plants when there are flowers with higher sugar and nectar
content available. Rhododendrons bloom early in the spring, and sometimes
are a dominating area flora. When these are the only flowers available
to ranging bees, the honey will be toxic, particularly in the springtime.
"Green," or unripened honey, i.e., uncapped honey whose water content has
not yet been reduced by the bees, seems to be the most suspect honey
for toxicity.
Although the dangers of mad honey were familiar to natives of the areas
where
it was well known, it was not shunned altogether. Pliny wrote that well
aged
'meli maenomenon' made a good mead. The people of the Caucasus area have
used toxic honey for centuries to add to alcoholic drinks. The purpose was
to
intensify the alcoholic effect. Toxic honey was known as 'deli bal' in
Turkey and was a major Black Sea export in the eighteenth century. Toxic
honey, known as 'miel fou' to consumers in Europe, was shipped in amounts
of
25 tons yearly, to be used in European taverns. The size of the dose
determined the effect, recreational drug or strong poison.
Adrienne Mayor, in his article titled "Mad Honey," published in the Nov/Dec
1995 issue of _Archaeology_, offers some fascinating speculations about
the use of mad honey among the Greeks. Roman writers, he states, noted
that the Pythia at Delphia used laurel leaves, either burned or chewed,
to induce the ecstatic state in which the future was prophesied.
Suggesting
instances where the use of grayanotoxins may have gone poorly, he cites
Plutarch's observation that Pythias often died young, or a trance that
went terribly out of control. In the 2nd century A.D., according to
Plutarch, the Pythia had become terribly disoriented, rushed about
shrieking, and then
collapsed and died. The meaning of the word laurel is unclear. The
Greek word is 'Daphne,' which can include plants native to Greece that
are poisonous, causing stupor, convulsions, and even death. Laurel and
bay are terms for species with similar characteristics such as dark,
glossy,
and evergreen type leaves, but include diverse species, such as
rhododendrons,
according to Mayor. He states that if the Pythia were using a plant to
assist their ecstatic states, it was likely one of the flowering plants
of the Ericacae family.
Mayor also advances the proposition that women who took part in religious
rites made use of mad honey, or mead with added mad honey. The _Homeric
Hymn to Hermes_, composed between the 8th and 6th centuries B.C., describes
bee-priestesses, or 'melissai,' who revealed the future under the influence
of "maddening" honey. These melissai lived by the cliffs of Mount
Parnassos
and fed on
'meli chloron,' food of the gods
Divinely maddened, they are inspired to speak the truth
But if they are deprived of the divine honeycomb
they cannot prophesy.
'Chloron' is usually translated as "golden" or "liquid," suggesting a mead,
but Mayor points out that 'chloron' can also indicate "green," as in fresh
or uncured. The 'meli' here can also mean the green unripened honey of
the spring, or mad honey. The hymn also compares the religious frenzy of
the melissai to that of the Maenads, female followers of Dionysos.
In the 5th century, playwright Euripedes wrote of the Maenads as waving
wands flowing with honey and who drank an intoxicating mixture of honey
and alcohol to achieve a prophetic state of mind. Mayor further speculates
that, because the Pythia at Delphi were also known as 'melessai,' or
bee-prophetesses, it is possible that mad honey, or mead spiked with
mad honey, was used to inspire the prophecies of the Delphic oracle.
This is a fairly loose summary of the references I'd posted earlier. My
wife Melissa (coincidently enough!) is the subscriber to this list, and she
pointed out Ken Stein's post because of my interest in mead making. I'd be
interested if other list members have any other comments on this subject.
--
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-/--Dan McFeeley-------\-----/---\---/-\---,--
mcfeeley@keynet.net \ / \_/ `-'
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